The area of Cooperative Intelligent Transport Systems (C-ITS) is in rapid development. C-ITS means that vehicles, road infrastructure and road-traffic authorities exchange and act on various traffic-related information for the purpose of traffic safety (decrease of number of accidents) and traffic efficiency (less congestion, reduced travel times, less pollution and lower cost for infrastructure). The messages to/from cars use radio communication. The cars can exchange information messages over direct radio communication links between the cars or via an intermediate network.
One problem with the current solutions is the limited efficiency with the congestion control. Since each car measures its local environment, it has no direct knowledge about how its transmissions interfere with other users (cars). While low in complexity level, there are many congestion scenarios wherein the distributed congestion control is inefficient. There are also problems with the centralized congestion control as part of a base station (e.g., an eNodeB (eNB) or a eNB type of road side unit (RSU) (eNB-RSU). The problem with the centralized congestion control as part of the eNB is that the centralized congestion control functionality is deployed in a multitude of eNBs and potentially coordinated among eNBs controlled by same and different mobile operator, which adds complexity and cost.
Accordingly, what is needed in the art is a new approach that overcomes the deficiencies associated with the current solutions.